The one caveat I would add which the author glosses over is Test in IE as a high priority unless you have a very tech-savvy audience. Compass/Blueprint abstract away most of the uglier CSS box-model hacks and I agree that IE users can live without gradients and rounded corners. But if the site looks awkward without the CSS3 tricks that don't work on the browser that >60% of your audience uses, you're going to need to tweak that aspect as well .
> most of the uglier CSS box-model hacks
In fact, I loved the concept so much that I began improving upon it myself[1], adding support for CoffeeScript and Amazon S3. For anyone who might find it useful, any testing or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Why is this?
Hypocritically, the text on this article's page is black.
I get your point about different perspectives, but for web pages we want everyone to read, we should be designing for the lowest common denominator.
I'm not so much arguing with the specific suggestions in the post as I am the general approach and worldview. There are some useful ideas in there, but they're weakened by being presented in "recepie" format. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't. It depends on the context. Better to learn principles than methods. It's quicker in the long run.
The only drawback is that you're incurring some technical debt because you may not be able to easily add needed features to the framework. That's okay for a MVP but needs to be considered before buying into the YUI Control #12 wholesale.
It couldn't hurt to A/B test though!
The downside is, there will be a bunch of sites that look the same, so folks will want to do some real work and find their own components.
There's the other upside that if your website isn't radically different from others, a lot of your users will already know how to use it. There could be a lot to gain with a lot of your visitors knowing how to extract information from it.
I guess the only real way to know is by testing!
You might also enjoy: https://github.com/mbriggs/zurb-awesome-buttons [demo: http://www.zurb.com/blog_uploads/0000/0617/buttons-03.html] - can be installed using bundler and is cleaner than the button gem.
Wonderful!